Science fiction is science’s friend and foe. It must pay its respects
to the science from which it springs, but must also go beyond it, to avoid
being merely predictive or analytic. Science is best used to kick-start
the more subjective metaphors and tensions the writer needs to work through.

Brian Aldiss’s new collection of short stories disappoint precisely
because they buddy-up to science, they are too careful and do not misuse
the facts. The author of Frankenstein Unbound is not Frankenstein enough
here – he never lets his fiction go off on its own little rampage.

You know after the first few pages that the key narrative trick of the
title story will never kick off into something really wild and interesting.
A businessman flying by Tupolev jet to to Russia finds that, by means of
some strange time loop, he is arriving not in the highly modern, content
and efficient Russia of his own time dimension, but somewhere grey and shoddy
ruled by a figure called Brezhnev.

As alternative worlds go, this is neither terrifying nor hilariously
satirical. Halfway through you start to realise there is not much fictional
mileage in it, and that all Aldiss seems to be getting at is how we all
secretly long for adventure.

The same sense of nowhere-to-go applies to ‘FOAM’, a sub-Oliver Sachs
tale of memory loss, and ‘A Day in the Life of a Galactic Empire’, where
a senior official is tested by his leader. Elsewhere, there are good items
within uninteresting structures. ‘A Life of Matter and Death’ is a slightly
flat tale of futuristic sibling rivalry, but deals also with the Odonata,
flying creatures who, because they eat human remains, become a poetic,
skybound funeral service.

In ‘Better Morphosis’ a cockroach wakes up one morning to find himself
transformed into Franz Kafka. This is a great and witty idea, cheaply handled
(many but-I-like-to-scuttle-not-write jokes).

Aldiss’s prose is full and occasionally delicate. He seems philosophically
canny (though in truth some of his metaphysical speculations are school-magazine
baloney). He is skilful and subtle as he teases out a plot line, allowing
the reader to remain pleasantly confused before he reveals the twist that
underlies his tale.

Nevertheless, this not-unenjoyable collection lacks heart. It is neither
friend nor foe of science, or fiction, but a kind of abstracted ally of
both – a Tupolev, in other words, not far enough.

Andrew Clifford is a science writer and critic.

Book titles matter. Would War and Peace have achieved classic status
if it had been called Oops! Here Comes Trouble!? Would Madame Bovary have
gained its place in the literary canon if Flaubert had named it The Ooh-La-La
Girl? I can only hope the answer is yes for Chet Raymo’s sake. His chosen
title, The Dork of Cork, suggests a lumbering, trivial, schoolboy-funny
book. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is a sophisticated, expansive,
witty and moving novel.

Raymo is a professor of physics and astronomy at Stonehill College,
Massachusetts, and this, his second novel – though he has written many popular
astronomy books – is a light, sweet box of deceptively simple and engaging
anecdotes and stories told by Frank, a dwarf and astronomer. The past
and the present are two strands to Frank’s life.

Frank tells us of those people and events who made him what he is: his
mother, his various father figures and his loves. As the book begins, Frank’s
autobiography, Nightstalk, is about to be published. When the book is
acclaimed and he becomes a successful literary figure, he muses on his status
as a celebrity/dwarf/author, half-artist, half-sideshow freak.

This sounds like a trite hotchpotch of every fashionable literary trope,
from post-modern self-referentiality to magical realism. But far from being
clever-clever, Raymo lyrically lends each event a fairy-tale sense of authenticity
and passion.

The novel turns around Bernadette, Frank’s mother. She arrives in postwar
Ireland, pregnant, after fleeing from a small French town where her teenage
suitor had tossed a coin and set off an unexploded bomb, killing everyone
around it except Bernadette, who becomes a local Joan of Arc. Both untouchable
and fiercely sexual, her almost icy vulnerability attracts other suitors
in Cork. An affair with Jack, a good family man, introduces Frank to the
wonders of astronomy. In between these intense tales, Frank muses on the
Solar System and on his own emergence as a literary star.

Raymo has the nimble, tender erudition of an Italo Calvino. His writing
seems effortless but is tremendously skilful. For example, his trick of
having Frank confide in us by telling us what he has left out of Nightstalk
gives the reader a privileged sense of intimacy. Raymo perhaps falters
in the last few pages when, at a book launch, Frank is reunited with the
characters he has been telling us about. This has a forced, farcical air,
like the finale of a Hollywood musical. Overall, though, after the four
words of the title, it is 354 pages of pleasure.

Andrew Clifford is a science writer and critic.

A giant cockroach is force-feeding me a Baked Alaska pudding. I’m terrified
of cockroaches and Baked Alaska makes me nauseous. I wrack my brain as to
how, why, what led to me getting into this predicament? In my search for an
explanation, I reshuffle each term of the situation – cockroach, Baked
Alaska, me. Only one insight offers relief and comprehension: this is a
dream, wake up. Here is another kind of nightmare: a banker makes
well-intentioned loans to Third World countries, and bankrupts them. And
another: an academic is arrested for breaching computer software copyright,
but he was only trying to help his students. To unpick these predicaments,
we need to move outside their terms, to use language that is different from
theirs. In her first book since The Death and Life of the Great American
Cities a decade ago, Jane Jacobs examines the ‘moral foundations of commerce
and politics’ but does little more than describe their terms, so she never
wakes up.

Her book is a lively, eclectic Platonic discussion between a publisher, a
crime novelist, a scientist, a lawyer, an environmental activist and a
banker. The thesis they hammer out is that all social activity is governed
by a two-pronged ethical structure, the ‘guardian moral syndrome’ and the
‘commercial moral syndrome’. The commercial syndrome governs commerce and
science, and includes precepts such as, ‘Be optimistic’, ‘Compete’, ‘Respect
contracts’, ‘Be open to inventiveness and novelty’, ‘Promote comfort and
convenience’, ‘Dissent for the sake of the task’. The guardian syndrome is
concerned with territorial responsibilities, and is defined by such terms as
‘Shun trading’, ‘Adhere to tradition’, ‘Take vengeance’, ‘Dispense
largesse’, ‘Be exclusive’, ‘Make rich use of leisure’, ‘Be ostentatious’.
Such qualities define armies, governments, police and state rulers.

These two moral syndromes allow the establishment of structures that on the
one hand support daily needs, and on the other combat corruption and
enemies. There is a danger though that one syndrome’s precepts must not
get mixed with the other’s. When they do, you get nightmare scenarios.
Banks start dispensing guardian syndrome ‘largesse’ (loans) to the Third
World. Or the state, giving scientific grants, imposes restrictive
‘guardian’ principles (like ‘adhere to tradition’) on what should be a
commercial activity, which explains the crippling tendency to conservation
in government-funded science research.

Jacobs’ analysis is flexible and becomes subtler as her book progresses, but
she is essentially on a road to nowhere. Her anthropological approach has
been thoroughly superseded by philosophy, semiotics and psychoanalysis.
Writers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan have
effectively articulated unified accounts not so much of morality, but of
what morality signifies.

Implicit in Jacobs’ approach is an anachronistic, discreet cultural
Darwinism – not for nothing does the title mention ‘survival’ (as in
‘fittest’). Jacobs seems to regard society as a kind of biological fact,
rather than something constructed and therefore deconstructable. She
believes that ethical structures evolved so that human beings could become
more successful than animals. (She often refers back to our hunting and
gathering days.) Of course, this anthropological ideology means that deep
explanations of human culture, of the meaning of morality for example, are
closed off. Indeed, in what sense is Jacobs’ two-faced morality ‘moral’
anyway – why isn’t it just expedient? Jacobs is forced to face this question
because she only observes contradictions, and never seeks an explanation for
them.

Describing contradictions makes for a not unenjoyable excursion into the
vagaries of social interaction, but provides no relief from their tangles
and deceptions. Ultimately, there is something pessimistic and circular
here. If we are all pragmatic beasts, tethered to a contradictory morality,
doesn’t this condemn us to a nightmare of reiterated mistakes – never to
awaken?

Andrew Clifford is a critic and writer.

The fact merchant is usually male – an uncle, or a friend’s father.
He informs you that a ‘kazatzka’ is a Slavonik folk dance performed by a
man and woman, that the precise origins of the Basque language are as yet
unknown. A new fact every day. That’s his motto. Facts, new ones, learn
’em, and spread the news.

Science, unfortunately, is fed into our culture in a similar way – fact
by fact. It rarely seems part of a story, or of human affairs – it hardly
ever seems connected to what we do and feel. The media, uncle-like, squeeze
out information in perforated snippets – ‘ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s believe they have made
a breakthrough in . . . ‘ ‘New research seems to show that . . .’ and so
on. So scientific knowledge, which has become extremely specialised, can
seem isolated, a vast pile of to-be-distributed-later, sawn-off facts. In
the great two cultures, science versus art debate, it is rarely recognised
that one of literature’s roles could be to reintegrate science into normal
human relations, removing the Gradgrind element. Penelope Farmer’s novel
of love, life and science does just that.

Snakes and Ladders is about the ins, outs, ups, downs, spins and backflips
of a pharmaceuticals company’s research into epilepsy in the Third World.
Its heroine is Anna Kern, sociologist, and wife to a neurologist David.
Both of them are requisitioned by the feverish, charismatic but slightly
straying Canadian drug executive Carter Jacoman. Field studies located in
Kenya and Ecuador are set up to prove Jacoman’s commercial hypothesis that
there is an untapped market for epilepsy drugs in Third World countries,
when industry wisdom has it that the very poor won’t pay for them. The
research will compare two drugs, Phenobarbitone and Lenytole, the latter
made by Jacoman’s multinational employers, Bader-Kleitz. Everyone knows
before the studies begin that Lenytole is more effective.

Part of what Farmer achieves is simply to show how mucky, complex and
intricate is much of science’s work. The research is littered with happenstance,
arguments and at least one major cock-up: in Ecuador, principal investigator
Dr Virgilio Aguadiente fails to ensure that his peasant volunteers had the
correct drugs and were taking them, thus almost invalidating the entire
scheme. But, within this, we also get a full sociology-of-science work.
Anna is employed to record the effects and social implications of epilepsy
treatment on the thousands of villagers who are the tests’ subjects. But
she also (not unlike Farmer, of course) has a wider, private brief to write
a study of the entire project, from village dinner to multinational office
meeting.

Crucially, Snakes and Ladders enters an area where the ideas of science
are not usually embraced, narrative literature. With its complex account
of the internal lives of its main protagonists, the book shows how such
lives affect, fractionally or seriously, the science work and its eventual
uses. Jacoman’s estrangement from his life, or his meeting and marrying
Anna’s best friend, the Walter Benjamin-quoting novelist Nicci, is shown
to be a kind of private-life enactment of his professional strengths and
shortcomings, tactical and moral. But these episodes also impinge upon the
very science he is trying to do. (Indeed, Jacoman, part brilliant maverick
scientists, part ambitious company exec, part incompetent, embodies the
different threads that Farmer is arguing make up the work of science.)

Farmer is not so much showing how private lives affect the professional
work we do, as how what we are characterises and colours the things we create
and set in motion, even science. She certainly never implies that science
is the same as or arises only out of such interpersonal subjectivity. The
central discussion here is perhaps, as Anna asks, ‘to what extent can an
individual influence society, to what extent is an individual wholly driven,
not to say enabled, by it?

Snakes and Ladders is too long, not as moving as it might have been,
and towards the end lapses into divisions it had otherwise done much to
heal: ’emotional’ Anna argues with ‘overrational’ David. But Farmer has
offered what seems like a surprisingly easy path through the art/science
divide. Crammed with theories, statistics, definitions (maybe not high science,
but certainly a good deal of hard, factual stuff) as the book is, nothing
is lost or diminished in any way by being integrated into a gripping, ever
melodramatic tale of relationships and personalities. Instead, the reader
receives a panoramic human picture of science. Though Snakes and Ladders
might lack the radical insight of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, which
it in some ways resembles, its canny reintegration of scientific knowledge
into art and life ably demonstrates the difference between defining a ‘metaxa’
and dancing it.

Andrew Clifford is a science writer.

Should mortals criticise gods? Can plebs indite the divine? Gore Vidal
thinks so. His latest book, Live from Golgotha, is a ruthless and obscene
satire on modern American religion. Its targets are society’s Greatest and
Goodest: religious leaders, politicians and (most accurately) media corporate
heads. Novelists, not surprisingly, remain untouched by his acid scorn and
rather bunkered wit. That’s a shame because if Live from Golgotha is anything
to go by, novelists like Vidal are as much in need of the poisoned pen to
rein in their excesses as anyone else.

In this novel, an unknown biblical saint, Timothy, is visited by various
holograms and molecularly-reconstituted VIPs from our television age. They
want to get him to write a new gospel and then hide it, so it can be discovered
in 2001. This will undo the work of a computer virus which is wiping out
all biblical stories and records from discs and memory banks, obliterating
Christianity. Somewhere in all this, TV moguls are visiting Timothy to get
him to act as anchorman during the televising of the crucifixion (lots of
time travelling here). It’s worth adding that Timothy is a distinctly modern
saint, and the biblical times described are ultracontemporary: Saint Paul
is a sex-mad fag, Jesus galvanises Rome only once he lowers the prime rate’.

But Live from Golgotha is deadly dry, overwitty and incoherent. If Vidal
wants to use computers and time travel to retell biblical stories, then
such devices need to be more than deus ex machina. Rather than himself ‘hacking’
into computer or television culture (as one might have hoped), Vidal just
uses them as ways of giving his plot further banal squeezes. He swaps time
and place the way others hop television channels and the result is a similar
sound-bite blur.

Of course, Vidal’s main target is American corporate religion. He wants
to analyse the relationship between God and America’s technological and
democrofascistic society. This is a trusty and worthy Vidalian theme. But
instead Vidal himself comes across as a bit of a false Messiah. More than
most, he must be aware of how revolutionary leaders and critics too often
turn out to be every bit as lordly and hierarchic as those they supplant.
Yet by the end Live from Golgotha is no less mystifying and exclusive than
the religion and politics it attacks.

Andrew Clifford is a science writer.

There are many stereotypes of the scientist: test-tube laden, frizzy
haired, maniacal eyes agleam – or fact-mad, white-coated and dry-of-manner.
But none seems to include an underlying humanity. Indeed, rationality itself
is generally perceived as inhuman. People seem to believe that structured
thought is cold, even insidiously nasty-minded, particularly when, like
Star Trek’s Mr Spock, someone uses analysis upon their emotional life. There
is little sense that rationality can offer us insight and progress into
all sorts of things, including our own feelings and experiences. Artists
are loathe to give it any credit. ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s like George Klein must work
largely on their own in their efforts to improve rationalism’s public image.

A professor at the department of tumour biology at the Karolinska Institute
in Stockholm, Klein is a scientist-essayist, in the mould of Primo Levi.
Klein is also Jewish, but unlike Levi he escaped the Nazi gas chambers when
he was a child in Hungary by fleeing the death-camp train. Nevertheless,
the Holocaust left its mark. It is perhaps not unexpected that Klein’s theme
in this book should be pieta, loosely translated as ‘compassion’. Klein’s
subjects are artists such as Attila Jozsef (the great Hungarian poet),
Edgar Allan Poe, Rainer Maria Rilke, the Holocaust, and, perhaps strongest
of all, the meaning of suicide.

There is a thin line between broadness of subject and hot-potch and,
truth be told, the variable essays in this book don’t tread it. The pieta
theme is concentrated in some and addressed only loosely in others. Klein’s
accounts of AIDS research and, in another chapter, the questions of biological
individuality, are cogent but rather medical. They barely fit in with the
rest of the book, particularly when in other essays – one about fatherlessness,
for example – Klein almost spills over into fiction or poetry as he yearns
for his father whom he never knew.

Nevertheless, there is a great deal of worth and power. The best essay,
‘Pista’, is about a boyhood friendship that declined disastrously during
adolescence and early manhood. Pista (a name only one letter away from pieta),
once a close confidante and friend of Klein’s, became increasingly removed
from Klein and the world in general, developing apocalyptic principles and
destroying his academic career through confrontational stands. Finally,
after a series of hints to Klein, Pista shot himself, after buying a human
skull to discover the thinnest part for a bullet to pierce. A clever poet
will refuse an obvious rhyme and replace it with a non-rhyme, knowing that
the reader had already heard the rhyme (and its message) in expectation.
Klein does something similar here, provoking many ideas but leaving us finally
with a painful lack of resolution: his failure to help Pista remains ‘an
incurable wound deep in my consciousness’.

Klein also has the essayist’s ear for the telling quotation and anecdote.
On the keeping alive of a desperately ill AIDS patient by elaborate technology,
Klein quotes a doctor’s ironic comment: ‘When you’re in Disneyland, you
take all the rides.’ In another chapter, Rudolf Vrba, the Auschwitz escapee
who featured in the documentary film Shoa, tells Klein that a colleague
asked after the screening of Shoa if all the Holocaust atrocities that Vrba
had described were really true. ‘I do not know,’ Vrba answered, ‘I was only
an actor reciting my lines.’ ‘How strange,’ the colleague remarked, ‘I didn’t
know you were an actor. Why did they say that film was made without any
²¹³¦³Ù´Ç°ù²õ?’

Klein penetrates; he is unflinchingly rational and humane. Pieta is
a serious and subtle collection, despite its inconsistencies. It deserves
a wide readership so that the values Klein so elegantly embodies, a belief
in science and in the even wider virtues of rationality, may gain a more
benign public profile.

Andrew Clifford is a science writer.

Here they come . . . faster than a speeding soundbite, flying higher
than an advert’s hype – the Myth Shatterers! They indefatigably continue
their unending crusade against myths, lies, misquotes, misunderstandings,
misinterpretations, unthought-out beliefs – and statistics. Members of the
public labouring helplessly under trivial misconceptions need not worry;
like modern day superheroes, the Myth-Shatterers will save them, fearlessly
explaining the false assumptions underlying their prejudiced convictions.

Milton Rothman is a myth-shatterer. In The Science Gap he points out
and then dismembers 16 common but untrue statements the public apparently
make about science such as: ‘Nothing is known for sure’; ‘ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s create
theories by intuition’; and ‘Nothing is impossible’. He is a knowledgable
physicist, with a readable style and a few points to make, but his method
tends to be rather literal. For example, he shows that ‘All theories are
equal’ isn’t correct because the Creationist account of the Earth’s beginnings
can’t be falsified, unlike the Evolutionists.

On one level, this kind of thing is fair enough. There is no doubt that
a good deal of wishful thinking occurs in relation to science. The trouble
is, Rothman thinks a myth is the same as a mistake – or on a par with a
misunderstanding or lack of knowledge. So Rothman’s book simply becomes
weighted down with mundane counterarguments and obvious simplifications
such as ‘More technology will solve all problems’. More importantly, this
terribly informational approach to truth – the idea that people need only
to be given a few facts to see the light – points up how profoundly Rothman,
and the kind of empiricist scientific attitude he represents, fails to understand
the true nature of myths.

Milton opens The Science Gap with a definition of myth as ‘Any fictitious
story, or unscientific account, theory, belief, etc’. Rothman doesn’t state
which dictionary this came from, but most would begin, or at least include
in their definitions, some notion of gods and heroes and some reference
to veiled meanings. After all, Rothman’s definition is apt for virtually
anything that is not perfectly true, and rather obscures that what distinguishes
myths from other fictions or untruths is that they are usually dramatic,
structurally complex and penetratingly symbolic. It’s these rich and hard-to-identify
aspects of myth which are at the root of the public’s powerful misunderstandings
about science – not simply factual errors or mathematical ignorance, as
Rothman appears to think.

Mistakes about science are indeed part of a massive and unwieldy Western
myth centred around the intellect’s relation to reality, but this cannot
be exploded by simply pointing out a few facts, just as few advocates of
apartheid will ever be convinced by the evidence of genetics. Rather, myths
are huge webs of imagery, emotion, truth, reality and fear that allow all
of us to comprehend, and miscomprehend, all sorts of things.

Rothman’s failure to fully credit these ‘deep structures’ leads him
to articulate banalities, such as that literature, drama, music, folklore,
myth and religion are all ways of ‘inventing worlds the way we would like
then to be’. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that these activities
may also be ways of reworking myths to incorporate new aspects of reality.
Or that every scientific theory, however true, itself always takes up a
place in some myth or other.

This is not to support Brian Appleyard, who seems to feel that science
itself is a myth or that it has somehow unfairly trespassed into mythical
territory. Nor is this to deny that science generally dealt with absolutely
real things. But it is to say that, thanks to this misunderstanding and
undervaluing of myth, The Science Gap merely bolsters one it tries to debunk:
that ‘ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s don’t have any imagination’. Indeed, until scientific Myth
Shatterers like Rothman understand the nature and importance of myths, they
will be powerless to resist any of their damage.

Andrew Clifford is a science writer.

Gets up. Brushes teeth. Breakfast. Work. Lunch. Work. Watches a bit
of telly, goes out for a meal. Comes home. Goes to bed. This is a life apparently
untroubled by philosophical explanations and speculations. It might be that
of a nonscientific member of the public but also that of a biology academic.

Both feel quietly confident they comprehend what there is to be comprehended
about the meaning of life but, in fact, whether they could put it into words
or not, this meaning springs from a particular account of science. For scientist
and nonscientist live in a scientific age and, Mary Midgley argues, many
key aspects of human life are explicitly or implicitly explained using
philosophical positions culled from science. The most mundane nine-to-five
life justifies itself, as it were, by crediting certain science-proven
things: the lack of God, the long-term pointless-ness of existence or the
inhumanity of the external world.

Clearly, then, and surprisingly, Midgley is correct in her contention
that science does offer us a kind of unspoken and extremely pessimistic
salvation. In Science as Salvation, she tries to show how these scientific
versions of scepticism and agnosticism may be challenged philosophically.
Her observations might not have been made were it not for the more optimistic
and dynamic nature of current scientific theories, but the key to her claims
rest on moral philosophy, psychology and Wittgensteinian linguistics.

For Midgley is a philosopher who grounds her work not so much in what
we should do, but rather in what we do do. This is the difference between
arguing that we do science because it is a means to an end, whether that
end is truth, usefulness or profit; and doing it because we are fascinated
by its subject matter – participating in science as one sings a song, not
for any ‘reason’ but because one wants to.

Such an approach, which has every philosophical justification, partitions
off other philosophers of science, such as Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn,
into a particular debate about methodological truth, and moves on to show
how science imagines it has erased our subjective desire for moral, psychological
and semantic salvation, when it has merely squashed it. As Midgley writes:
‘Throw purpose out through the door and it seems to creep in up the drains
and through the ceiling.’

Midgley’s attack singles out science’s emphasis on life as a battle
against immortality (life seems meaningless because we will die); and science’s
version of the outside world as composed of inert, meaningless matter connected
only by chance and contingency. There are two strands to her dissection
of this negative salvationism.

The smaller strand is that such positions are not supported scientifically.
Her evidence is very strong in this respect – she makes grandiose interpreters
of the very mild claims of Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation, which
locked uncertainty into science, look utterly foolish. But sometimes she
makes the same mistake as those who, to use her own words, believe that
they can fulfil the full meaning of the phrase ‘Next year in Jerusalem’
by booking a package tour to Israel. Midgley’s central points would be true
arguably even if the most mechanistic view of the Universe was proved to
be scientifically immaculate.

Her main purpose is to show how science has substituted explanations
of the world as a various and lively place for explanations that discreetly
depict it as dead, perverse and threatening. The idea that matter is inert
and connected only by chance seems a neutral one yet Midgley’s brief survey
of the metaphors we are obliged to use to convey it – casinos or gypsies
– give it a conspiratorial and malign taint. Matter seems to have merely
been denied a purpose but has been given a negative one. And the main scientific
justification for this account is that all others – literary, historical,
metaphysical and so on – are effectively meaningless because they have no
connection with the scientific method. But because we do science for many
of the reasons that we sing songs, it becomes pressing that science itself,
and its view of the world, is one of many activities of desire, all of which
contribute to our sense of value.

Midgley is a witty, sometimes brilliant writer and this is not an easy
book to sum up. Science as Salvation is a cut above most attempts to offer
a serious critique of science because it does so with precision and attention.
No member of the public reading this book could fail to have his or her
ideas about science and life’s meaning altered.

Andrew Clifford is a science writer.

Hack language is an Esperanto nightmare. Although constructed for apparently
functional purposes, the vocabulary, of hacking rather than being merely
positivist and exact, is a slangy, subjective composite of Yiddishisms,
sci-fi, high-tech, comics, 1950s white-coat science, hippymumble, Zen and
linguistic grammar games; a kind of amended Valley talk for the antiauthoritarian
and unfashionable – perfect, in other words, for conversing just one screen
to another. Who could doubt hackers need a dictionary?

Well, they’ve got one (an update on the 1983 version, actually) and
bulletproof (‘capable of correctly recovering from any imaginable exception
condition’) it is. From abbrev to zorkmid, here is everything you wanted
to know about SEX (Software EXchange) but were afraid to ASCII (American
Standard Code for Information Exchange). The definitions are swift and witty,
accompanied by anecdotes from urban computer mythology, together with a
generous helping of surprisingly reflexive and accurate cultural selfanalysis.

Appendix B’s ‘Portrait of J. Random Hacker’, for example, confesses
that ‘hackers have relatively little ability to identify emotionally with
other people’. Still, why worry? The real world might be bogus and bagbiting,
but in the green of the screen everything’s flavourful, bytexexual and even
elegant. As artificial languages go, this is as supple as the best of them
and with the moby New Hacker’s Dictionary as a guise, you can spend all
your time being cognitocious and skiffy (all right, I patched those up).

Andrew Clifford is a freelance writer.

There are many ways in which children irritate adults. One example is
how they receive presents. They complain about how its wheels are too big,
hair is too long, rules are impossible to understand – the list goes on
and so does the child until any sensible parent exclaims: ‘Well, don’t play
with the bloody thing then!’ This is the signal for the child to sob; and
then admit to itself what the parent knew all along: it loves that toy.

Phyllis Grosskurth’s account of the rise and fall of the Inner Circle,
the committee chosen by Freud in 1912 to steer psychoanalysis through its
infancy, attacks the members and their leader in a low-key, almost endless
tirade. But since that attack often employs the very psychoanalytic terms
which the inner circle did so much to make common currency, one can’t help
feeling that Grosskurth, despite herself, loves that toy.

Certainly, the dry eagerness of her narration bears the imprimatur of
that least interesting of commentators: the disappointed disciple. In her
introduction, Grosskurth employs a succession of metaphors naming Freud
as the leader of Communist cell, a ringmaster brandishing his whip, a jealous
patriarch, a ‘withholding parent’ and a kind of imperial king. Elsewhere,
members of the committee are accused of enjoying staying in good hotels;
and in the book’s epilogue Grosskurth announces that her story is about
‘real people wreaking havoc on each other.’

There is no doubt that the committee often behaved appallingly among
themselves, towards patients and towards Freud – and he towards them. Detailed,
new evidence is offered to that effect, particularly from the circular letters,
or Rundbriefe, which were the most significant formal expression of the
Committee’s power. (The other seems to have been a gold ring each member
was given by Freud, an act which perhaps seems pompous now.)

Freud had become a rather testy autocrat, virtually ordering members
to marry woman they might otherwise not have chosen, happily describing
himself as a ‘giant’ and behaving with odd lack of sympathy over members’
misfortunes, such as the death of Ernest Jones’s wife. The committee members
were not a terribly likeable bunch, in this account at least. Jones is wheedling
and deceitful, whether defending himself against the belligerent and charmless
Otto Rank’s accusation that he made an antisemitic remark, or in his fawning
accusations to Freud concerning other members. Karl Abraham comes out of
things better, and Sandor Ferenczi, likewise, is rather out of control but
appealing. Bickering, petty, over-abstracting – these were difficult, complex
people grappling with a difficult, complex body of work.

What is missing from this book is precisely what everyone was arguing
about: psychoanalytic theory. This is only supplied to describe the committee’s
shortcomings. Freud is referred to as ‘the omniscient father’, he has a
‘voyeuristic involvement’ in Ferenczi’s romance and a ‘neurotic anxiety
over receiving mail’. True, Grosskurth avoids a too Californian littering
of jargon, but in the key disputes outlined in this book – between Freud
and Jung but more importantly between Freud, Rank and Ferenczi – detailed
discussion of theory is avoided altogether. Indeed, Grosskurth argues that
‘Freud used the sexual issue merely as an excuse to rid himself of Jung’,
as though the sexual aspect of psychoanalysis was a kind of decorative flourish.
It is its kernel.

I might have had more sympathy for Grosskurth’s damning of the Inner
Circle if it had moved towards ‘division and death’. In fact, it did a remarkable
job of seeing a controversial movement into maturity. So that this book,
which could have been detailed and intricate, seems over-specialist and
trivial. There is, after all, a nonpsychoanalytic term for complaining about
your toys: ‘ingratitude’.

Andrew Clifford is a science writer.